When asked what Moleculent’s cell-cell interaction mapping technology provides to translational researchers, CEO Olle Ericsson explained that it adds “a new layer of information,” specifically “analyzing how cells talk to each other and which cells talk to each other and decoding that information.” Specifically, “what receptors and ligands and pathways are cells actually using when they’re talking to each other and building up the tissues and organisms that we’re analyzing,” he said. That’s the next frontier, that “can have a transformational impact on how we understand human health.”
Moleculent officially opened its doors last year, raising $26 million in Series A financing, to build a technology designed to help scientists observe healthy and diseased cells functioning at a complex, networked level. To date, the company has attracted financing from investors such as ARCH Venture Partners and EIR Ventures. Now, the Stockholm, Sweden-based biotech says its technology is ready to be put through its paces and has begun soliciting applications for participants in an early access program (EAP) aimed at testing the high-plex platform.
Through the so-called Techstart EAP, select scientists will have access to the company’s platform, which uses a proprietary proximity ligation assay to functionally profile cell-cell interactions directly from formalin-fixed paraffin-embedded (FFPE) tissue specimens. Specifically, it uses antibodies attached to oligonucleotides that bind to targets in the cell. When two antibodies bind to nearby targets, their DNA strands connect to form a new molecule that can be detected.
For now, scientists accepted to the EAP will ship their prepared samples to the company for processing. Separately, the company is working on an automated instrument that will be launched in the near future, which could be installed in translational laboratories globally, Ericsson told GEN. The company will likely have a separate EAP in the next year that will be aimed at testing the instrument, which it claims will enable large-scale studies with high reproducibility and minimal hands-on time.
While information about how cells communicate is relevant across biological systems and disease areas, Moleculent is focusing initially on immuno-oncology applications. To that end, the company’s first offering is a T-cell-focused panel geared toward antigen presentation, immune checkpoints, and cell type markers. The panel profiles the interactions among cancer and immune cells in clinical FFPE samples and is designed to complement existing spatial methods. Some of the questions that scientists could use the panel to study include assessing the types of immune cells present in their samples as well as “how they interact with each other [and] with the tumor,” Ericsson said. They could also evaluate how tumors interact with the immune system to “avoid being eliminated” as well as extract “clues [as] to why certain patients are responding to treatment while others are not.”
Beyond immuno-oncology, autoimmune disease is a logical next application area for Moleculent’s tech, Ericsson said. After that, the company could branch into infectious diseases and neurological disorders, which are all “big areas where this type of data becomes very valuable and also have a lot of involvement of the immune system.”
Moleculent’s leadership team includes individuals with expertise in developing and commercializing life science tools in companies such as 10x Genomics, Agilent Technologies, and PerkinElmer. Ericsson himself previously worked in the noninvasive prenatal space. Fundamentally, “we’re a team of engineers” that like “solving technically challenging problems that have an impact on human health and how we understand human health,” he told GEN.
